Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday May 22, 2008 @08:50AM
from the wouldn't-you-be dept.

1sockchuck writes "The EPA has been seeking at least 100 data center operators willing to share data about their energy usage to help the government develop an Energy Star program for data centers. Thus far, only 54 data centers have signed up, which suggests that few data center operators are eager to tell the government exactly how much energy they are using. The EPA issued a report to Congress last year on data center power usage, and is already developing an Energy Star program to rate servers. Can a program designed to rank the energy efficiency of appliances and computer monitors be a useful tool in addressing the enormous energy consumption of data centers?"

Some people dont share data with the gubmints not because they are evil but because they dont trust the government. Rank the efficencies of data centers? Cant the people who own/run the energy centers do that themselves? You know, read the labels on the devices and such?

You know, read the labels on the devices and such?To some degree, but some possible improvements would require a standardization mandate. For instance, I was reading here a few years ago that Google can make (or get made) hardware to their own specifications, and they save an awful lot of power by using strictly 12V DC to the motherboards, if not the whole boxes. They were advocating for the rest of the industry to do that, but if you run a data center and can't buy the hardware to do that, you're out of luck.

They were advocating for the rest of the industry to do that, but if you run a data center and can't buy the hardware to do that, you're out of luck.

You know--rather than a government mandate to get that hardware out there, how about demand?
Seriously--if I could purchase devices that consume DC power and I could get DC at my house CHEAPER than I could go the whole AC route, I'd do it--especially if saved me money too.

That's probably why data centers don't want the government involved. The government

If they have a decent power distribution board they can get an instantaneous readout from that.

Targeting one industry for it's power usage is a bit dumb. For instance I work in a fairly normal sized supermarket which pulls 415Vx3 at around 400A on each, so how many supermarkets are there around the world?

And if you want worse, here in Australia and other countries with large mining operations, the mines and other associated industries can pull the entire out

They've already gotten 54 out of 100 data centres. There are countries with a lower percentage of voters at the ballots!
Besides which, I'm not surprised at this at all. No-one can be horrified at your electricity bill if you don't advertise it (especially to the EPA).

saddly i know the power useage of one data center that would not be reporting in.. lets put it this way.. based on the farm usage they turn off power to other floors in the building.. not to conserve power but because the main line coming into the building is their bottle neck

Are reasoning and math lost skills, even on a site tagged "news for nerds"?

They are seeking "at least 100 data centers" to participate.

It DOES NOT SAY that they asked 100. They have put out a general request for datacenters of 1000 square feet or more.

So, out of all the data centers in the US that are over 1000 square feet, only 54 have agreed to participate. That is NOT 54/100 or 54%, it is a drop in the bucket, and it does seem to indicate a reluctance to participate. Although it could just as easily be apathy.

I think you're referring to reading comprehension skills, not math and reasoning as such. Flying in the face of/. norms, I read TFA again. There is no mention of how many data centers were queried, though their goal of 100 responses could be used to guesstimate. Also, it says the plan is 1 year old and the data centers need to compile 12 consecutive months of energy usage and submit it before June 1. How the 54 other companies compiled 12 consecutive months of data in 11 months is conveniently left out, but perhaps there will be more companies complying with the request closer to the deadline.

I concede you are correct that it really is reading comprehension, not math or reasoning skills at fault here.

However, even RTFA-ing twice didn't give you a complete grasp. The article never mentions querying any data centers, just that they want them. They may have called/emailed/mailed to some, or they may have just put it up on the web and hoped.

Additionally, it says that the participants will begin collecting 12 consecutive months of data at the start of the program, "and submit the data by June 1, 2009." That's next year.

Most of them were probably just too lazy to bother. I'm guessing that the information requested was a bit more complex than "How many kwh per month do you guys use?" The lack of replies probably has more to do with the data center people having better things to do.

I know a guy who owns a laundromat. The city did something and connected to his fire sprinkler system for water in the project through the outside port that lets the fire fighter inject a chemical that make a foam suppressant into the system. I forget exactly what was being done but they had to fill water trucks up to hose the dust down and the alternative was running a temporary line that blocked his parking lot whihc meant almost no business until whatever was finished.After filing his taxes for the year,

As someone who has worked around and at several very large data centers including those who hosted servers for ebay, google, accenture, ford, honda, etc, I would suggest that it is very likely that the "rest" have a very good understanding of how much power they consume. Floor space is only a small fraction of the processes of determining server capacity. Power and cooling are the real limiting factor in any large floor space data center.

> So 54 data centers responded out of "over 100"?> That seems pretty good to me.Indeed, I would consider a 54% response rate high for this kind of thing.

> How many of the rest just didn't know how much energy> they used, or couldn't be bothered to look it up?

Or have better things to do than fill out silly questionnaires for Yet Another Pointless Government Study Destined To Accomplish Precisely Jack Diddley Squat? I know what my response would have been: after reading about half of the first s

We should stop conflating energy consumed at fixed locations from the energy consumed by the transportation sector. We have enough energy in the form of coal, nuclear power, tar sands, wind, solar, cow dung and what not. Sure, there are problems and pollution and different costs and benefits for each of these sources. But the one big advantage they have is that, they don't make us dependent on fickle foreign powers in unstable regions. We are 100% self sufficient in the fixed-point-energy consumption sector.

But it is a completely different story when it comes to the energy consumed in transportation. There is no viable alternative to gasoline for cars, diesel for trucks and kerosene for the airplanes in the near future. Nothing. And all the crude oil we import goes to transportation.

The politicians are clueless dumb idiots who go through the motions of doing something, on the crazy logic, "we must do something, it is something so we are doing it".

Uh, coal and tar sands are kind of a real problem as there are huge impacts on the environment both from mining them and from using them. Probably 90+% of the new capacity brought online in the last 30 years has been coal, and much of that growth has been to power electronics. Datacenters and corporate computers are a non-insignificant chunk of that. I know my datacenter for a midsized company probably draws as much power as the homes of all of the IT staff combined. Transportation is only 28% of the US energy puzzle, and as long as we keep relying on dead plants we are going to have a problem, coal that isn't used to needlessly power datacenters today can be turned into synthetic oil in the future. Hopefully not for transportation but for plastics and pharmaceuticals, where it is used as a feedstock rather than for energy production.

"But it is a completely different story when it comes to the energy consumed in transportation. There is no viable alternative to gasoline for cars, diesel for trucks and kerosene for the airplanes in the near future. Nothing. And all the crude oil we import goes to transportation."

Well, you're right for now. While we're starting to develop alternative fuels...let's try to get past the ECO-freaks out there, that won't let us drill for our own oil, in our country!! China is drilling in cuban waters just o

Well, you're right for now. While we're starting to develop alternative fuels...let's try to get past the ECO-freaks out there, that won't let us drill for our own oil, in our country!! China is drilling in cuban waters just off the coast of FL...why the fuck aren't we drilling in the lucrative oil fields offshore of FL, NJ, CA...??

I believe, it is because when the rest of the world is tapped out, there will still be quite a bit in "environmentally protected" areas that will be used to retain world superpower status long after everybody else goes back to riding behind horses.

Yeah but that's too much leap of a logic for most people to make. Saying we do not track our power usage so we have no data stops the thought there, as opposed to sayin hey, someone else tracks our power usage, and who would that be? The power company sending us the electric bills! Duh!

This may be a dumb question - but what's wrong with reading the electric bill for the place? The DC's I've been in or a party too - EVERYTHING connected to the DC or in it, had a purpose solely devoted to keeping the servers up and powered, one way or the other.

One place wasn't a dedicated data center. There were corporate offices of a handful of companies in addition to the one that owned the building. One of those companies ran their own small datacenter (100 machines or so) an the company that owned the building ran 2 (different departments). The amount of power their own used were estimated, and they just ran UPS's that ran over that. The company that ran their own datacenter also paid on an estimated basis of the total amount of power they used. Large portion

That would work well for DCs that are self contained. Most of the DCs I've been in are part of a campus or a building that is all on the same grid, so determining what is being used just by the DC would be a project.

Thus far, only 54 data centers have signed up, which suggests that few data center operators are eager to tell the government exactly how much energy they are using.

Well, I do have major issues, but I don't think that's what you meant. I can take 5 minutes, or 5 hours to read the electricity bill, if I had to. The problem is, which you seemed to miss in my post, our building gets one bill for electricity. Inside that building we have a dozen heavy printing presses, cardboard crusher, electric lift trucks that get charged nightly, lights, security system, etc. etc., and yes, a data center.

It's all on one bill. How the fuck am I suppposed to tell how much the DC

Not sayin you have time for it
(hell I don't even have time to be posting on Slashdot),
but, assuming all your Data Center equipment is thru a UPS, most UPS's will give a readout of power usage, many of them will even log it.
In most place I've worked on, I've been involved in designing Building Automation Systems that connect to the UPS's, etc., relay alarms to the proper people, gather histories on usage, and generally monitor and control everything in sight (or hidden).

Data centers have to know how much they're using as they have to have sufficient UPS backup to keep their systems running in the event of street power outage.

Groups that maintain these data centers also wind up paying the electric bills, so even if they don't know how much is actually in use at ant single point in time, it's pretty easy to look at a few bills and see what the usage over the past 30 days were.

Our data center had a catastrophic failure last year when the generator test failed and the operators didn't notice they had no power until the UPS died 15 minutes later. Absolutely everything lost power, and we spent the day recovering systems from various messy states. The exception was our Tandem, used for our clinical system, which was kept alive by a series of D batteries powering the CPU. We used to make fun of those D battieries, but never again.

In any case, our data center is part of a larger facility and while it's easy to report on overall power use for the facility, it's mixed in with so much else that it's hard to get a good estimate for power use by the data center alone. As we found out the hard way, the UPS wasn't adequate for downtimes longer than 15 minutes. We've since made a big push to improve the UPS and reduce the number of physical servers in the data center (switching to virtual whenever possible).

he generator test failed and the operators didn't notice they had no power until the UPS died 15 minutes later...We've since made a big push to improve the UPS and reduce the number of physical servers in the data center

Might I suggest you replace your Engineering Staff as well? If your "operators" didn't notice their generator wasn't online and that you were on batteries, they have no business being anywhere near a data center.

Oh, I'm pretty sure the operators were duly chastised. Like any disaster, there were several opportunities to notice the issue and correct it, but sadly they didn't happen. There were other failures, such as when the diesel generator didn't supply power to the data center. The operators also sit in an area outside the data center, and I suspect the beeping UPS didn't get heard through the big glass windows.

Yeah, that's why when I worked for Cisco we had multiple strobe lights and a very loud alarm (think fire alarm loud) outside of both doors to the datacenter, kind of hard to miss those. Of course where I am now we just have the transfer switch and UPS email and page us whenever there is a power event.

An electric bill for the last 30 days (or last year) probably isn't fine enough to be of much use. Probably, in order to design useful standards, the power usage would need to be broken down between what the servers use, what the storage uses, what the cooling demand is, lighting, etc. They probably also would like to correlate that with usage data like: how many processes running, pages served up, GB in and out, and so on.

I wouldn't be surpised if there was some format(s) that the EPA needs this data

It is also important to note that the people who might have access to this data - the IT people, HVAC people, and building engineers, are almost certainly not the people who see and pay the bills.

At my workplace, the data center expenses comes out of the data center funds, so while you're right that the HVAC person doesn't literally see the bill, the head of the department needs to know those numbers to stay on-budget. Whether the department head shares that with the staff...perhaps that is another question (in our case he does).

seriously? maybe someone should point out how little the people trying to regulate these understand about them. i can point to a few other sources of pollution that would be much better to reign in for their practices before starting to look at datacenters: warehouses that are entirely lit 24x7, universities that don't set their computer monitors to "sleep" after several hours of non-use or even leave all of their end-user systems up all-night every night. that's without even turning to the automobile in

An HPC cluster can easily consume 20+KW per rack. Across 5-10 racks (or more) per cluster. And that's not counting the AC that's required to keep the air cool.

While setting monitors to sleep mode and powering things off do help, data centers have a lot of power use in a small space. It's clearly in everyone's interest to reduce that power since it results in a lot of savings across the board.

Users can put in more systems per square foot, data center managers can rely on fewer UPS systems and fewer tons of AC, and the resulting lower utility bills is just icing on the cake.

Computer data centers use too much energy. Next thing you know, Congressman will be up in arms, hauling data center leads in front of a good public beating, and then passing legislation to tax excess profits. What would happen next? Data centers leave the USA in droves, 1,000,000 jobs evaporate, and the USA loses yet another industry due to a government that is as malicious towards successful enterprise as it is incompetent.

If you don't want to see that happen, vote Republicans into congress and the whitehouse

Hmmm. Here's the thing. The great irony of American politics is that despite Liberals being aligned to Democrats and Conservatives being aligned to Republicans, it is the Republicans that have actually passed most of the liberal legislation over the last 40 years.

You can cherry-pick all you want. In the end, the US government over the past 40-50 years has been defined by policies that would be considered "conservative" in most parts of the globe.Much of the legislation you mention was either inevitable, the work of their predecessors, or had little to no impact.

That said, even though I don't particularly like Bush at all, he has had a small number of bright moments. His most recent Veto of the $288 billion farm bill was absolutely the right thing to do, even thoug

Finally, some DC managers barely know where the power is going. They see the power bill, they seem some automated power meter reading at key points such as power distribution units, but they cannot really tell you how much a machine, or even a rack, is consuming.

The problem with manufacturers' plates is that the power rating on the plates is ridiculous overkill. A rack-moounted server rated for 600 W on

I went the other route: amp meters on all of the new in rack PDU's (we use the chatsworth vertical power strips and opt for the amp meter option). Its a bit more expensive, but not too bad when you consider the overall cost of what is in that rack.This way I know exactly how much the rack as a whole is pulling. More importantly, I know that each of the PDU's in the rack is under 50% so that in case a power supply causes a short, I dont loose the entire rack due to a cascading failure. (I've seen it happen w

Amen to that! With a little bit of luck, metered strips will become increasingly more common, saving everyone a lot of headaches. You would not believe what can be found in some DCs. Daisy-chained strips spanning multiple racks, redundant power supplies all fed by the same UPS, etc.Out of professional curiosity, how does your DC manage to keep track of equipment status, installs and decommissions? Do you use a specific DC management package, or do you subscribe to the "ad-hoc spreadsheet on a shared drive"

Keep track? hahahahah Its all up in my head:-)We dont go through enough adds/moves/changes to make it worth the effort of tracking with anything more than a spreadsheet. Given that I've managed to cut the number of physical servers in half over the past 4 years (during which ime the number of services have gone up 10x) I dont predict the need for anything more specialized anytime soon.

I've seen some palces that turn over a a few doezn servers a day and they needed a management app to keep track of everythi

Every data center that exists has a high carbon footprint. The San Francisco Bay Area is host to a myriad number of data centers that'll now find it convenient to relocate to a more hospitable environment or purchase indulgences in the form of carbon offsets.

When it comes to killing a golden goose, governments have no competitors. That goes double for state governments looking to fill a $15 Billion deficit. That goes triple fo

I think a lot of the issues with data centers are about inefficient code. In my humble opinion, with no hard data, I feel that older MS software from the 2000-2003 days used to consume a heck of a lot less cpu cycles than the newer 2005-2008 dotnetizized/vistized versions that are just hogs when it comes to speed, and to get the same work done consume a lot more cycles and a lot more power. Maybe this will nudge the software companies to pay better attention to the fact that computing speed and efficiency a

Google probably ranks as the largest data energy user, having by far the largest number of data centers and nodes (approaching 3 million). On the other hand they've almost always paid attention to energy costs (except for their bad, bad, white home page), building custom low-energy custom servers. They probaly also have the lowest per petabyte energy consumption of large data centers.

I was under the impression LCDs consumed a fairly constant power regardless of the displayed colour. All the color is the orientation of the subpixels, which control the colour levels let through from a constant source (CCFL or LEDs).

I have done a number of projects for a number of companies focused on power saving in the data center.

One company was building a fan control system to reduce the power used by cooling fans in the racks. We just had a Slashdot article about being more selective about load distribution and shutting down systems not being utilized for the load.

Data centers use redundant power which is more expensive than line power because UPS system are never 100% efficient.

To top it off, servers put out a LOT of heat. That is two types of load: The power draw of the server and the power draw of the data center cooling system.

Data centers are a prime target for green work, and I bet with a little development work you could EASILY cut the power utilization by 30%. Upgrading and replacing four older machines with two newer machines will cut power usage.

Maybe software efficiency is important again as doing more with less power is greener.

Which is why a lot of them don't want to release this information to the governemt. Being placed on a bottom of the list because your company has a 10 year server replacement average vs. a 5 year or just because your server has more load then then the other guy with the same amount of equiptment. Giving information to the government is rairly to your advantage, so why do it if you are not forced.We just got over the case of what to do with companies who allowed the government to spy on their customers and

I'm too dumb to accept the conventional wisdom, so I've been prototyping a mini server that pulls 105 watts under maximum load (both CPU's at 100% and a RAID-1 rebuild, was how I defined 'max') and about 70 watts when mostly idle. It's 'only' a Core2Duo w/ 6MB of cache, but it's a 1.333 GHz FSB with memory clocked at half of that to minimize wait states, and that's plenty for the kinds of servers I usually need (web, mail, web database, etc.). If I need more I'

Data centers are a prime target for green work, and I bet with a little development work you could EASILY cut the power utilization by 30%. Upgrading and replacing four older machines with two newer machines will cut power usage.Replacing machines has a cost though both in terms of staff time and in terms of risk. I would imagine this is especially true of datacenters that perform a wide range of different functions, possiblly for a wide range of different customers.

The total energy used in a data center is just the sum of the energy used in the various component parts. The components include the various boxes of electronics, the power supplies, the lighting, and the cooling.

Every data center operator is intensely interested in power consumption. The power and cooling cost real, serious money. Any reduction in that cost goes straight to the bottom line. And, we have finite power and cooling for the building, so if/when the needs of the various boxes exceed those limits, we have to do expensive and disruptive upgrades.

If every component part (computer, network switch, ups, monitor, etc.) were labeled with its power and cooling requirements, data center operators would use that information to select equipment that costs less to operate. In the life cycle of a piece of equipment, the electricity to operate it is a big part of the cost. When we go to buy new equipment, we usually have to choose from among several different units that could fit the purpose. The numbers that determine the operating cost absolutely would be used during that selection process.

A publicity campaign, like "Energy Star" could help us to paint the business "Green". But the numbers are what we really need to make rational business decisions.

If every component part (computer, network switch, ups, monitor, etc.) were labeled with its power and cooling requirements, data center operators would use that information to select equipment that costs less to operate. In the life cycle of a piece of equipment, the electricity to operate it is a big part of the cost. When we go to buy new equipment, we usually have to choose from among several different units that could fit the purpose. The numbers that determine the operating cost absolutely would be us

That is one of the few world problems that is already being solved.
Intel and AMD and others are working on the next generation of processors,
that use less power: Intel Says Chips Will Run Faster, Using Less Power [nytimes.com]. Intel is currently
delivering processors built on 45 nanometer rules. (At that size, there are
perhaps 1000 transistors in the width of a human hair.)

They are working on a 32 nanometer
process [wikipedia.org], which has already been demonstrated. The next after that is 22
nanometers [wikipedia.org] and then 16 nanometers [wikipedia.org] and 11 nanometers [wikipedia.org]
as the Wikipedia articles say. The smaller conductor width rules use smaller
transistors which use less power.

At the same time, they will make processors with wider silicon wafers,
18 inches wide [zdnet.co.uk] rather than the 12 inch wide wafers they
use now. The smaller devices and larger wafers mean that there will be many
more processors per wafer, making the costs go down.

What these companies are doing is VERY impressive.

The companies have not been as good at proposing new uses for the
greater processing power. Data centers need the greater processing power as
well as use of smaller amounts of energy, but where else is more processing
power needed? Will grandma's octo-core cell phone of the future not just
report the weather, but calculate it? Will games use full ray-tracing?

I suspect that the greater processing power is needed, but all the
needs haven't yet been discovered. To me, that's a very interesting problem.

What Intel and AMD don't tell you, however, is that while they shrink die size and increase performance (and increase performance != increase in GHz), they turn around and tell system manufacturers that the TPD is lower. For example, the 5300 Xeon family from Intel topped out at a 120w for most bins (there were a few 150w pieces at the end) and their thermal design was 60c. The 5400 Xeon family might use 120w top bin, 80w on the average bins - however, they lowered the TPD to 55c, meaning the system makers

What's in it for the data center? Of course they're not "eager" for new tasks on their To-Do list!

"Hi, we'd like you to generously share some internal data and in return we'd like to give you responsibilities and guidelines about how we'll let you give your data to us! Sweet deal, right?"

Presumably they are paying their power bills and thus have some incentive to take "reasonable" steps toward conservation. The government will need to use a carrot or a stick to coax this information from a busy business. I'm surprised simply announcing an interest in the information has netted as many responses as they've gotten.

Perhaps a lot of the datacenters are more leary of "homeland security" putting spyware, etc in their datacenter. Once you let the goverment in to take a look, who knows how much further they will want to go.

Over 50 data centers have given into government demands for private data. There is wide speculation on why so many data centers have willfully fallen under the sway of the government. There are rumors about bribes involving lowering energy costs. How many more data centers will cave? Is your data safe?!

There are probably at least Two reasons that this was ignored 1) The form letter from the Government was ignored like unsolicited credit card application. 2) The data center in question needs their people to work on projects instead of collecting information for said Government.

Data centers themselves are actually (somewhat) easy to figure out - and to figure out how to conserve power, at least to some extent. Nobody's going to do unless they were planning to anyway, or have a financial motive. But at least it's a central location, you can identify where the power is going, etc. It's going to happen over time as the cost of energy goes up, more than likely. One major reason for inefficient data centers is actually a lack of money - you don't get the budget to rip and replace, so you have to keep tacking things on.

So the EPA likes it because it's tractable. But in many organizations, most IT-related energy use is actually at the edge - factoring in thousands of computers, monitors, printers, edge switches, wireless access points, VOIP phones or digital handsets (a simple analog phone on-hook uses almost no power), etc. Dozens of computers in an open office area adds a significant amount of heat that has to be removed. And as more and more equipment runs uses Ethernet and TCP/IP, you need more and more network switch ports, often delivering PoE. I think a lot of organizations are going to end up pointing fingers at their IT departments because they can identify the cost, and it's easier to blame one group in one location than to face the fact that everyone's incremental usage adds up to significant numbers.

I agree completely that the bigger issue in corporations is the energy used by the end-user. When you add up all the desktops using 200+ watts plus local printers etc, it really adds up.I think there is a real future for thin-clients and some sort of centralized resources in the future, at least for larger departments and corporations. The costs of maintaining 100's or 1000's of PC's with licenses, administration, maintainence and energy costs is huge. If you can reduce that by thin-clients and virtualized

I think some of the data centers (or more correctly, the companies who operate them) may have some reluctance because of the potential regulation this may create...1) Gather data from volunteer data centers.2) Establish "Energy Star" rating.3) Use "Energy Star" rating to regulate how big datacenters can be, what kind of layout they must have, etc., etc.4) Demand that any company bidding on government contracts must be "Energy Star" level 5 or whatever. New regulatory branch to monitor all this...

There have to be at least 100 Universities and Quasi-governmental data centers that could be coaxed into giving this information. Most universities take many federal grants, and companies like Freddie Mac, and Sallie Mae are heavily regulated.

I decided to check my energy usage on my desktops (two) and my laptop. What amazed me was just how much wattage the Desktop was using when you add the monitor and external 2.1 speakers. It was around 220-250 watts.What was even more amazing was that the laptop and router together were only using 35-40 watts. It's also interesting to watch the power usage go up temporarily when the CPU is exercised and then to see it drop immediately back down. How do they get a laptop with a 15.4 screen and speakers to use